The National Long-Term Care Survey (NLTCS) has completed
six waves, nominally at five-year intervals, 1982, 1984, 1989, 1994,
1999, and 2004. The NLTCS is a nationally-representative sample both
of the community and of institutionalized populations and is longitudinal
in that sample persons join the survey once they reach 65 years of age and stay
in the survey until they either die or are lost to follow-up. At each
wave, a screener questionnaire is administered to the sample which
divides the sample into three parts: the non-disabled (frequently
called screen-outs), the disabled but living in the community, and the
disabled living in an institution. About 5,000 people die between
waves and are replaced by a sample of about that size of people who
have become age 65 since the prior wave. Because of budget
considerations it usually has not been possible to continue the entire
non-disabled sample into the next wave. Instead a sample of the
non-disabled is drawn to keep the total sample size for a wave at
about 20,000. One of the interesting and useful features of the NLTCS
is that data are collected on help that the sample person receives
from informal caregivers.

The NLTCS is a very data-rich resource with many components,
including disability measures, medical conditions, attained education
levels, and income. Numerous papers have used it as a source of data
addressing a wide variety of topics related to aging and
disability.

Ancillary surveys have been added to measure other characteristics
of the 65 and older population, to include a Caregiver Survey to
acquire data on informal caregivers themselves (done in 1989, 1999,
and 2004) and Next-of-Kin (NOK) surveys administered to sample persons
who had died between 1982 and 1984 and again between 1994 and
1999. The sample has been frequently supplemented to compensate for
low representation in some survey components, in particular the 75 years and older
and 95 years and older components. In 1999 physical specimens were drawn from a
sample of persons who responded to the survey. These physical
specimens (blood where possible, alternatively a buccal wash) are
subject to a genetic analysis and, in the case of blood, to a panel
of proteins believed to be particularly important to health.

NLTCS Survey Data

Survey data are available in ASCII and SAS format.

The Analytic Data File, a file of derived variables for all waves
of the survey incorporates correction factors and consistency
checking. The Analytic Data File covers all waves of the survey and is
available in both ASCII and SAS formats. Final versions of data for
all waves, up to and including 1999 and a beta version for 2004, have
been released and are supported by documentation.

This collection is restricted-use. Users interested in obtaining these data from NACDA are required to complete a signed Data Use Agreement.
This form can also be accessed on the download page associated with this collection. Completed forms with original signature(s) should be emailed to icpsr-nacda@umich.edu.

The data are available only on CD-ROM, and can be obtained by following the instructions in the Data Use Agreement. If the user
cannot work with the CD-ROM they may contact User Support to make
other arrangements.

All documentation files are now publicly available for this study. In addition, the crosswalk which is in an Excel file (.xlsx) for all years is also publicly available.

2010-05-26 The data are restricted, but the documentation is available for download.

2010-05-25 All documentation files are now available for download.

Notes

The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

One or more files in this data collection have special restrictions. Restricted data files are not available for direct download from the website; click on the Restricted Data button to learn more.

The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. Please see version history for more details.

This study is maintained and distributed by the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA), the aging program within ICPSR. NACDA is sponsored by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) at the National Institutes of Heath (NIH).